On 10/31/2012 7:08 PM, Laura Hale wrote:
Do you have any evidence for anons don't contribute significantly to content that gets peer reviewed?
Let me reiterate: I have seen over a 100 GAs close and personal, reviewing several dozen. I have never seen an IP major contributor that did most of the work. This is not a great sample, but good enough to go on unless somebody shows better data.
The reason it would appear they are not involved in processes is because more often than they expressly prohibited from doing so. The implication here could be: IP addresses are contributing GA level content but regular contributors are not monitoring articles where IP addresses are doing lots of work and regular contributors are not supporting taking of the work to the highest level.
A valid speculation, but going against the Linus Law. If this was more than exception to the rule, the GA community would've discovered this and dealt with this a long time ago.
http://toolserver.org/~daniel/WikiSense/Contributors.php?wikilang=en&wik... http://toolserver.org/%7Edaniel/WikiSense/Contributors.php?wikilang=en&wikifam=.wikipedia.org&grouped=on&page=Samantha_Stosur is one of the more active articles (which is admittedly crap) with a high IP address ratio. There are several highly active Wikipedia editors contributing to it. 463 of the 749 editors are IP addresses. Still, total edits by registered editors outnumbers unregistered editors with 1,150 total edits to 1,175. Despite this, the volume of contributors are not actually resulting in edits that work towards improving assessment.
A better analysis could be something like this: IP addresses are more likely to represent a large editing population on an article that has higher visibility and more traffic. The quality of the contributions to these articles is universally poor for registered and unregistered users. At the same time, wikipedia processes favour articles that have less visibility and where there is less inherent conflict. The necessity of covering a topic comprehensively also serves as a barrier to taking these higher visibility articles to GA as this is a challenge, and serves as a discouraging factor for taking an article through processes. GA, Peer Review and FAC favour more narrow topics that are less visible and get less traffic. This type of article is likely to have a much small editing pool, and less likely to be found by IP address editors. (Example: Tennis articles have more IP address edits than articles about sport shooting.) This means IP addresses are less likely to be actively contributing to these articles. As processes implicitly lock them out, there is little reason for these users to improve per guidelines on these less visible articles.
Agreed here. IPs represent general populace. General populace has little experience doing quality edits. Putting aside a significant proportions of edits that are not constructive (even is some are good faithed), vast majority of others add little value. It takes a registered editor (someone who took the time to familiarize themselves with MoS and other policies, gained an editor identity and thus registered) to take the haphazard mess that is your average article, copyedit/expand/reference it, give it a uniform style, and move it towards the Wikipedia peer review procedures (that most anons don't even know exists).
-- Piotr Konieczny
"To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski